perception is fatal: on the bus (seat)

Had I missed it?

Crossing the road to the bus stop, I can't tell whether or not I am going to be rewarded for my morning dash for the 8:08am bus. It is 8:08am exactly according to the clock on my mobile phone. There isn't anyone standing at the bus stop itself, which is a bad sign.

There is, however, a middle-aged couple standing by the road about ten or so metres away who would have seen the bus go by if it had already come and gone. So I decide to ask. Perhaps they were waiting for a pickup from a car.

I approach the man and pant: “Excuse me, I'msorrybuthaveyouseenthebusgoby?” The husband looks at me blankly and the wife, dressed in hijab, also says nothing. So I augment: “My bus is supposed to be here at 8:08am and I'm wondering if it has come and gone already and if you have seen it.” Then the man smiles and says, “We are new in Australia. Sorry, no speak English.” “Oh, really?” I decide that his English will suffice, and enunciate more slowly, “Has the bus gone?” “Oh! No, no, no. Coming!” It transpires that they are also waiting for the bus and that they arrived in Australia a week ago.

“Where from?” I inquire.

“Afghanistan,” he informs.

The anticipated bus arrives and I lead the way on board and take my pick of seats. I wonder if they are heading to the CIT for English lessons for newly arrived migrants and silently wish them well. The bus is only three quarters full and spare seats, while dispersed, are available, mainly near the back of the bus. Having seated myself in the seat of my choice I am able to observe the husband dive indecorously for the first seat that he comes to on walking down the aisle. His wife, who had been following, walks quickly by to the back of the bus, unacknowledged, to find her own seat.

My warm and positive feelings towards them dissipate. That is not right, I disapprove. Most men that I know would have, I judge, either thoughtfully or instinctively, reserved that first seat for a woman, a wife. And then there was the way that he dived for his seat, his body bent forward, hands reaching out, as if he thought that someone would push him aside to steal it from him. By all the rules of public transportation etiquette, the seat was his, for he was next.

In Australia.

Perhaps in Afghanistan the norm was for the men to seat themselves ahead of the women. Perhaps in Afghanistan it would have made sense for him to dive, instinctively, for someone could well have pushed him aside to steal his seat even though he was next and the seat was his.

Although I am not certain that I can ascribe what I observed to “culture”, for the rest of the bus trip I reflect upon differences.

perception is fatal: on the bus (pin)

The bus rolled stationery to acquire a few more passengers. I had already noticed the Indian mother seated in the seat just in front, for it was a cold day and she wore a salwar kameez and a warm woolen shawl wrapped about her shoulders and neck. The shawl looked enviously warm and comfortable, and her plait of braided black hair, interweaved with a few strands of white, rested on the shawl down her back. She flipped open her phone and I caught a glimpse on the screen of a photo taken at a beach of a little browned-skinned boy. Then, as I watched, she reached her hand to her neck and down underneath the shawl to pull out a thick twisted rope gold chain. The gold chain was dull yellow in colour and given the the sub-continental respect for the metal I assume it was real. Clipped onto the chain, I saw, was a large safety pin. She unclipped the pin from its chain, opened her mouth and, to my apprehension, popped the needle inside her mouth cavity and began to use its point as a toothpick. Into the crevices between her teeth the needle scraped, this way and that. Killing my breath, I willed her to desist and to notice that the new passengers had just about all boarded and the bus could jerk to movement at any moment. Just in time, the needle came out. She clipped the safety pin back onto the chain and tucked it back underneath her shawl as I breathed in relief and marvelled.

the frustration of life

Patrick White, The Solid Mandala, p. 187:

Some years later, when they got them, he hated Arthur's dogs--though technically one of them was his own. If anyone, thinking of his good, had been interested enough to accuse Waldo Brown of neglecting his responsibilities to his fellow men, nobody could have accused the dogs of neglecting theirs: in being, in reminding at least one of their owners of the exasperation, the frustration of life, in farting and shitting under his nose, in setting beneath his feet traps of elastic flesh and electric fur, to say nothing of iron jaws, in chewing up bank notes, and far more precious, the sheets of thoughts which escaped from his mind--lost for ever. So the whole purpose of the dogs, together with Arthur, seemed to be to remind, to constantly to remind.

more flatulence

• As for Runt and Scruffy, they accepted the fatality of their arbitrary relationship, gnawing, licking, tumbling each other over. They enjoyed the luxury of each other's farts. (page 181)
  

dissolution

a sink
full of dirty dishes
but one clean spoon left
that
I dare not use
for
then
I
will have
no clean spoons left
and dissolved
into
a sink
full of dirty dishes
I
will be

eun

what she said

INT. BATHROOM - EARLY MORNING

JESSIE, an elderly, white-haired resident of the B. Retirement Community, sits naked on a plastic showering chair, the kind with a hole cut out of the seat. ANITA, a young Sri Lankan woman, stands beside the chair holding the shower rosette in her hand. She directs the water onto Jessie's body, and with her other hand washes Jessie with a soapy wash-cloth. She wears lemon-yellow latex medical gloves.

ANITA
Do you want to wash your hair today?

JESSIE
No. Not today.

ANITA
But you didn't wash your hair yesterday.

JESSIE
I did wash my hair yesterday.

ANITA
Are you sure? Didn't you wash your hair on Friday?

JESSIE
No, it was yesterday.

ANITA
You washed your hair yesterday?

JESSIE
I don't want to wash my hair today.

Anita lifts up Jessie's breasts and wipes under the breasts with her cloth before lifting up Jessie's arms and doing the same to Jessie's armpits. Then Anita rinses the cloth and starts wiping Jessie's face.

ANITA
But you don't look pretty--

JESSIE
(interrupting)
You don't look pretty.

CLOSE UP - LOOK OF DISMAY ON ANITA'S FACE

ANITA
--you wash your hair, then you look pretty.

(shuts the water off and turns around to pick up the towel lying on the bed just outside the bathroom)

Okay. You have a hair wash tomorrow, okay?

Jessie does not answer. Anita starts patting Jessie's body with the towel.

ANITA (VOICE OVER)

Jessie doesn't like me.

I don't like doing Jessie. She's not one of the nice ones.

I'm going to shower someone else, even when it gets crazy like this morning.

Sharon didn't even ring at night, just two hours before in the morning, that she was sick and not coming in for her shift. So unresponsible. And she's the duty RN.

I am so tired. I worked double shift yesterday.

I have been in Australia a year and a half now, and I have good friends, but I worry.

I can't even send money home, paying thousands a year to study here. Also rent and living costs. So expensive living here.

I must work.

I like working in the high-care ward better. You feel more useful. And they're not always complaining about nothing, not like these ones. But there's not enough shifts, and they never tell you in time whether you can work or not.

I don't like the rich people's ward. Just because they pay so much money to get in, and more money on top, some of them treat us like servants.

It tires me having to talk to them, but I try to talk nice all the time.

Professional, too. You must always tidy up the bed sheets. Even if you've done everything else, if the bed looks untidy, people will think you haven't done your job properly.

It's unfair for the kitchen staff to ask us to help set the tables before breakfast. Although they are too busy, too, trying to keep to schedule, it is enough for us to get everyone up, showered and dressed for breakfast on time.

The seepage and redness around John's catheter opening worries me.

There is a war going on at home.

I miss home. I am going home after I finish my nursing degree.

And after I get PR, too, of course.

Maybe Jessie did wash her hair yesterday.

But, she's used that as an excuse before, to not even shower. She told each of us that she had showered the day before with someone else, and then we found out that she hadn't showered for a week!

I said: "But you don't look pretty."

I meant: "But you won't look pretty, if you don't wash your hair!" To persuade, jokingly.

I need to study for my Written English test next month. My speaking is good, but my writing is not good enough.

I will go see how Sofie is doing with John.

She laughs at how I pronounce "lub" when I say "love".

I love listening to her speak. Her accent is so sexy, being Sudanese, so I tease her back.

the lost weekend

Good morning.
Hello. How are you?
I'm good.
That's the way. How was your weekend?
It was good.
What did you get up to?
I spent the weekend enthralled by seductive imaginary futures I'm too coward to attempt. Between thralls, I ate intermittently.
Oh. Really?
Yes. I managed to do the dishes but not the groceries.
That's... interesting.
Yes. It was... interesting.

the 2008 Schools Spectacular

Bored of a Sunday afternoon, I found myself sitting at my desk watching the 2008 Schools Spectacular online on ABC iView.

It began well enough, with a performance that raised goosebumps of appreciation along my arms in spite of the summer heat: "Love is in the air!" the kid from the Special School sang with all his heart, somewhat off-key, but quite debonair in a white, John Paul Young style dinner jacket. "Love is in the air! Oooh oooh oooh!" echoed his more tuneful co-singer.

It was only when I saw the kids costumed with fake leg attachments run onto the stage that I recalled that I had spectated a Spectacular, live, many years back. A fake third leg could only mean one thing: Rolf Harris, introduced as "the great Australian entertainer". And I had seen him perform this very same song, Jake the Peg, at a Spectacular past, with a stageful of kids imitating his antics, at no less grand a venue than the Opera House (and with not the slightest of sly allusions to the obvious dirty joke).

The family had gone to spectacle the participation of my younger sibling in the Spectacular. Her part in the Spectacle had been to be one of several hundred kids in the Background Choir. The Background Choir, the individuals of which the audience could neither distinctly hear, nor see, had literally formed the backdrop to the singing and dancing of the Star Performers on stage, for the Background Choir had sat, shadowed in darkness for the most part, in seats sloping upwards directly behind the stage.

At the Opera House we had sat and spectated with the families of all the other kids, most of whom, like my sister, were also singing in the Background Choir. Each school must have been allocated blocks of seating to sell to the families, for we found ourselves sitting together with the families of the kids from her primary school. Isn't that? someone pointed out. I turned around to catch a glimpse of S--, eyes circled with mascara in a makeup-white face. S-- had a younger sibling too.

Before her family moved house we'd been neighbours for some years while we had both attended the same primary school. S-- had been one of the popular girls, although our school had been too small to have had impermeable boundaries between the different groups. We hadn't been friends, however. I had visited her house, next door, the once, and she had never come over to mine. Her mother was a journalist, I had somehow come to know, and S-- went to after school dance classes; the only extra-curricular classes I had attended during primary school had been the selective school entrance exam preparation classes to which I had been driven to on weekends for two months or three when I was in grade six. Disgracefully, considering, I had either daydreamed right through or jigged entirely. Early on did I develop the tendencies of the rebel who rebels by dropping out.

While walking home from the station earlier that year I had bumped into J--, a friend from the same primary school, who had gone to another high school and whom I hadn't seen in over a year. We must have been around fourteen or fifteen. J-- had said of S--: "She's become a slut. She had sex with a guy in a bedroom at a party." I have no idea why J--, who, I later heard, became a local real estate agent, had thought it necessary that I be in the know about S--. I was nonchalant in my response, suggesting that this was no big deal and that, at the cool parties, fifteen year olds could have sex, and what did it matter anyway? J-- walked away unconvinced of the soundness of my contrarian judgment while I walked away with vague feelings of envy. I had never attended parties (with boys!) at which sex could have been a possibility.

With odd memories of my school days surfacing as I watched, my viewing of the 2008 Spectacular took a turn more cynical.

The program for the 2008 Spectacle included many enthusiastically performed covers of American pop songs; musical Australiana, including Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and a truly inane song about bushrangers; and renditions of unabashedly inspirational ballads, such as Climb Every Mountain and You Raise Me Up. While a Star Performer crooned You Raise Me Up, grimacing expressively all the while, "the heros of the public education system", the teachers, were invited by the Spectacular host to walk onto the stage, which they did, meaningfully slowly. Seemingly, the Spectacular lauded the fantasy of a world in which teachers actually knew and cared for the kids under their charge and all kids were encouraged to realize their full potential.

The contrast between the roles of the Background Choir and the Star Performers in the Spectacular suggested to me that at least one of these notions was but just a fantasy; the Star Performers, the small number of kids who had received intensive training and adult attention, who had had their musical and theatrical talents nurtured, were given almost the entirety of attention, with some Star Performers leading song after song, while the Background Choir remained, well, obviously, in the background. I found this contrast interesting, for the Spectacular seemed to be an illustration of the theory that what we call talent (and the Spectacular host invoked 'talent', over and over), for the most part, is the result of nurture.

My recollections of my school days attested to a reality rather different of teachers, too. I recalled my sixth grade teacher, Mrs T; she was known to have favourites. All smiles and jokes when looking affectionately upon the most personable kids, of whom she approved, she had had a weirdly personal grudge against the kid in our class who had had epilepsy and some unelaborated upon developmental disorder. Accusing him of deliberately trying to make her life difficult she had railed against his alleged misbehaviour. He had had shaky, illegible handwriting and the habit of responding with a smart-alecky comment when provoked by meaningless questioning of the kind often used against kids by adults. But, to my recollection, at least, he had not behaved in any way that justified Mrs T's paroxysms of exasperation in the classroom. No wonder the kid, who had seemed to more or less comprehend the classwork, had looked nervous in class. The quiet kids, like quiet kids in classrooms everywhere, had been left alone to their private thoughts and imaginations.

Mrs T's opinion of herself had been that she was going mad: I have the distinct memory of Mrs T plonking away on a piano one afternoon, singing in her broken cackle a song about Santa and reindeer that she had written and composed for us to sing at an end of year show, and breaking down, mid-song, for reasons unknown, crying out "I'm going mad, I'm going mad, I tell you!" to the discordant accompaniment of the banging of random piano keys. Her cries had been addressed to herself and not to us kids who had waited out the school day, sitting cross-legged on the green carpet of the classroom floor. Most teachers, in contrast, had not been mad, but indifferent; babysitters, who had kept their personalities wrapped up to themselves, doing little more than duly copy out material from textbooks onto boards, mark completed exercises and administer the occasional test.

The Spectacular's attempts to turn multiculturalism into theatrical performance similarly induced my cynicism. In celebration of the Beijing Olympics, kids dressed as Chinamen, with long queues trailing down the backs of their red silk pyjama suits, ran around on stage. I couldn't help but wonder if there had been any real "Chinamen", boys and girls of Chinese background, dressed up as fake ones, running about under the exaggerated chinky eyes created with makeup. Talk about creating cognitive dissonance!

Other multicultural cultures were also celebrated (I seem to remember a Pharaoh themed song and dance number) but like most of mainstream Australian culture the Spectacle remains predominantly Anglo-Celtic. I am not Anglo-Celtic but I don't think that this was why the performance of Danny Boy, by a quartet of male Star Performers, and of Abide with Me, which was accompanied by dancers acting out ANZAC themed choreography, left me unmoved. The singing by a trio of brown-skinned Aboriginal (or Islander) kids, I did like; this performance stood out for its relative understatement.

In my old age I have perhaps become resentful, for to write cynically about kids with 'talent', however conceptualised, whether privileged or not, seems so. But here is no great matter-- I have suspected for some time now that I am more Waldo than Arthur. One day I too shall have a box of Private Thoughts to burn and make truly my own. And secret blogs to delete.

Found: the Doug Anderson perspective http://media.smh.com.au/?rid=44373

flatulence in 'The Solid Mandala'

References to flatulence in Patrick White's 'The Solid Mandala':

• Only the old pot-bellied dogs appeared convinced of the mild pleasures they enjoyed, frolicking and farting, though somewhat cranky with each other. One of them - Runt - lifted his leg on a seedy cabbage and almost overbalanced. (page 24)
  
  
• So they turned, and the two dogs were at once joyful. They tossed their sterns in the air, and cavorted a little. Their tongues lolled on their grinning teeth. One of the dogs farted, and turned to smell whether it was he. (page 69)
  

a culinary discovery

A culinary discovery, most delish:

• fusilli, cooked al dente, and salted
• a generous libation of virgin olive oil
• anchovy fillets preserved in olive oil, chopped
• kiwi fruit, sliced
• a light grinding of black pepper

Stir with fork until anchovy and kiwi fruit disintegrate. Savour warm.